October 31, 2012

Triumph Of The Anti-Language

There is a talk I give to groups from time to time called "The Golden Age Of Bullshit."

The talk has a few basic themes. One of which is that we are living in an age in which business bullshit artists have invented an anti-language. Its objective is to confuse rather than clarify. This is the opposite of what language is supposed to do.

All I can say is, if you've never virtualized your enterprise application environment, dude it's awesome.

But that's not all. By subscribing to their "techcast" I could also...

Deploy mission-critical services with maximum resiliency

Architect effective site failover and disaster recovery processes

Cancel my trip to Hawaii.

And speaking of bullshit, I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day. There were two flat tires sitting at the next table. I actually heard one of them use the words "mission-critical." I didn't know people really said it. I thought it was just a term whose use was legally restricted to bad radio spots and idiotic emails.

All this bullshit used to be funny. Now it's just depressing. We have a whole generation of business people whose brains have been corrupted and debased by a vocabulary of jargon and obfuscation.

They think they are hiding their ignorance behind a curtain of tarted up language. In fact, they are exposing it.

"Developing culture intelligence as an insights competency will empower you to position the brand promise at the intersection of cultural and human truths, creating things for the mass market by speaking to individuals. The implications for community managers and brands as publishers are clear."

"Architect" as a verb (and noun) is common in the IT industry where it carries a different meaning to "design" or "build." A "Software Architect" is a specialised job that goes beyond software design as it will incorporate all parts of the business process. Definitely not common usage outside of IT industry, but one of cardinal rules of advertising: Know your audience.Unless anybody here has ever had to design IT systems to meet 'five nines' availability requirements (aka mission-critical systems), methinks this crowd is not the target audience?

Hi There. Well amusingly enough, I wrote that email. Actually, I'm sort of a conduit. There are dozen or so stakeholders on that particular technology and they wrote, un-wrote and rewrote that one. Hehehe. You know how it goes.

That said, I have a couple observations: First, it's easy to take snarky potshots at messages targeted to a highly specialized audience. Do I say say things like "architect effective site failover" at parties? Does anyone? Of course not. Would you snark at zoologists using specialized terms? No. But technology copy is low-hanging fruit.

Second, the language is hardly inflated and certainly isn't misleading. If anything, it's overly specific. That's a result of this organization's extreme sensitivity to making unsubstantiated claims.

I'm not defending overinflated, misleading or uninformed copy. There's plenty of it, and the world would be a better place without it.

Do I love this as copy? No, not at all. Frankly, it lacks charm and humanity. But that's not what we're selling. Does it serve its purpose? Absolutely.

My question for you is this: do you further the discussion and evolution of the craft by tagging as bullshit concepts that are irrelevant to most people or that you simply don't understand?

“Going back to the core of what an idea shop is and mixing it in with tech so you're providing useful value both emotionally and functionally to our clients' brands and, ultimately, their consumers. We're going to be looking at the consumer journey holistically and finding opportunities where the brand can provide some value. Ultimately what we're trying to do is create unions between brands and consumers.”Miles Nadal, courtesy of George Parker.

@richard:Very good defense of your copy and very true. You shouldn't feel stung. Perhaps the email should never have reached Bob, as he clearly isn't part of your audience. The real problem is that so many people in advertising use so much jargon and nonsense (see Mr. Smart's post and mine above) that it is hard to distinguish when something is directed to a specific group, such as you were doing, or if it is more bullshit masquerading as communication. I guess in this instance, with all the targets out there, Bob trained his sights on the one innocent guy. keep up the good work.

So I'll pipe in and say that I'm the "guilty" content owner behind Richard. This was actually a difficult exercise because we were trying to avoid the usual high level IT buzz words, and really target a very specific technical audience - most of whom have the word "Architect" in their official job titles. In IT vernacular, these are people who architect IT systems, and are often under tremendous pressure to create an architecture that won't go down. For "mission critical" IT systems (eg. airline reservation system), seconds of downtime can translate to millions in lost revenue for the company that "Architect" works for.

All that said, I'm the first to admit that my writing can always be better... It is a struggle to find new and better ways to craft a message when you work in a specialized industry. Maybe I should try zoology for my next gig? Then I could come up with all sorts of bad puns about my new job generating bull-shit.cheersKate

Oh dear. I just re-read my last comment. Please don't slam me too hard for that rushed and poorly written grammar!I better just get back to my day job and leave this blogging bullshit to the experts! :)

There are long lasting ways to get the amazing middle you crave. These genius tipsWill help you shed inches and pounds, banish the bloat, And feel even more gorgeous.we have very best advice for quickly shrinking your tummy. Here are the surprisingHello, skinny jeans! Stop making these 5 Major mistakes and you will finally lose your stubborn belly fathttp://juicyabs.comhttp://www.facebook.com/5TipsToAFlatStomach?skip_nax_wizard=true

Kate & Richard (and A/C): I'm in the industry too and work at one of Oracle's competitors (and I'm a very recognizable name, hence the Anonymous...) and I have to confess, we do the same here, and I find myself in a constant fight against it.

So in your defense, I don't mind your nouns -- weird to some, specific and meaningful to us. I do object to a lot of the verbs -- and I think it's the verbs that make our communications sound like dead copy rather than live speech. Verbs like "facilitate" and "leverage" and "enable" are always red flags to me -- it either does it or it doesn't do it.

Good jargon uses words that are very specific in meaning (consolidate, virtualize, disaster recovery, etc.). Bad jargon uses words that are very generic or even completely empty of meaning while sounding important and meaningful (leverage, facilitate, etc.). Make sense?

Should have picked an SEO company instead of a tech company. Their copy is far worse, far less sensical, and far more designed to hide the fact they do almost nothing. At least Oracle actually has something behind the babble.

Thanks for up-leveling synergistic disruptive thought leadership and facilitating deployment of 360-degree interface donutization by keeping us in the loop and out of the weeds, shifting the paradigm, and de-incentivizing enterprise pain points. Let's circle back for a touch-base and think outside the box. You're on my radar.

This is just to my Anonymous Competitor:Everyone else will be bored to tears with my post, but I suppose that will make some of us even!

I appreciate the constructive criticism. My challenge is that I'm not actually pitching an Oracle product per se here (I know... hard to believe for Oracle, but I'm not actually aligned to a specific product).This webcast is about raising awareness for a program whose purpose is to test and then document/publish (for free) recommended ways to connect various Oracle technologies to best address specific customer requirements. In this case, we're trying to help those "system architects" whose job it is to set up and deploy application services that are intolerant of downtime.So this webcast is really about a tool that gets used (verb) to make it easier to deploy the actual products (nouns).But I think this is really good feedback and I thank you. I shall endeavor to ease off on these "passive verbs".cheersKate

"Caustic Yet Truthful"

"The Most provocative Man In Advertising"

"Savage Critiques Of Digital Hype"

"Fabulously Irreverent"

CONTACT BOB

Over 60,000 people have watched Bob's talk at Advertising week, Europe

You Are Caller Number...

Click Image

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."